Kazakhstan is investigating a major criminal case involving fake temporary residence permits. The case is being handled by Kazakhstan’s National Security Committee, and dozens of Russian citizens of conscription age are being questioned as witnesses, according to the project Slovo Zashchity. Human rights advocates say the investigation could lead to the expulsion of Russian émigrés who left the country because of the war. Since late February this year, interrogations have reportedly been conducted in groups, with investigators summoning three or four people at a time. The fact that the case is being handled not by the migration police but by the security services may indicate preparations for broader measures, including deportations based on lists coordinated in advance with the Russian side, Slovo Zashchity пишет.
Formally, the case is being treated as a non-political criminal matter. Tens of thousands of Russian émigrés in Kazakhstan still remain in a legal “gray zone.” The country recognizes only labor migration, and there are no mechanisms for granting political asylum to Russians. A temporary residence permit allows a person to stay in Kazakhstan for up to one year, but obtaining one requires employment and registration at a place of residence. A market of intermediaries offering fictitious documents has grown around this procedure, and many Russians have used such services.
Kazakhstan regularly detains Russians wanted in politically motivated cases. In February, it became known that 25-year-old Russian citizen Aleksandr Kachkurkin had been deported. According to human rights defenders, an arrest warrant was issued against him while he was already being transferred to Russia. The grounds for the treason charge were money transfers to Ukraine. Human rights organizations advise Russians who may be implicated in the case involving fake residence permits to leave Kazakhstan rather than wait for forced deportation.
“Kazakhstan has become a categorically unsafe country for Russians,” said Margarita Kuchusheva, a lawyer with the Anti-War Committee’s Consuls project. According to her, there have been at least four cases since the start of the war in which people were being handed over in an accelerated manner and in circumvention of procedural norms. Kazakhstan approved Moscow’s extradition requests for Yulia Yemelyanova, a former employee of Navalny’s штаб in St. Petersburg, and Mansur Movlayev, a critic of Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov. Also, in early February, a court in Kazakhstan refused political asylum to Yevgeny Korobov, a senior lieutenant in Russia’s 15th Motorized Rifle Brigade. After being wounded in Ukraine, he decided to desert, and a criminal case was opened against him in Russia.
